Recently, an annual combination tournament and joint training session with a group I am associated with advertised the meeting as a 'Gasshuku and Shiai'.
I am familiar with the term 'shiai' as another word for 'tournament'. However, I was not familiar with the term 'gasshuku'.
So I looked around online, and it seems to have become a very popular term lately in the USA and perhaps elsewhere outside of Japan. Everybody is referring to their annual get-together for their martial arts group as a 'gasshuku'.
I did some quick searching and found that with a couple of exceptions, the term does not appear in most news stories or martial arts publications until around 1970, and only a few times. It really seems to have taken off in 2010 or so, and it is gaining popularity.
From what I can gather, a 'gasshuku' is a Japanese term that literally means "staying together" as a group to build relationships. It was primarily and historically used in Japan for school children, and was not specifically applied to martial artists.
Boot-camp bukatsu no place for the fainthearted | The Japan Times
http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts-files/jsc/jsc-history-booklet.pdf
This is the first example of the term I found in a Google News search:
Nationale Meisterschaften im Goju Ryu Karate - Sport - Allgemeine Zeitung
It is a reference (in German, I believe) to a gasshuku that a leader of a Namibian Goju Ryu group has been invited to attend.
Here is another reference from 2008:
FightingArts.com - Traditional winter training in Japan: The Kashima jodo gasshuku
Searching old Black Belt Magazine articles online, I found a reference in 1984, again to a Goju Ryu group:
Black Belt
So this is all kind of new to me. A term I had not heard before, which seems to be a traditional Japanese term usually applied to school children, and now applied to annual martial arts training gatherings, often in combination with a 'shiai' or tournament.
Fascinating!
I am familiar with the term 'shiai' as another word for 'tournament'. However, I was not familiar with the term 'gasshuku'.
So I looked around online, and it seems to have become a very popular term lately in the USA and perhaps elsewhere outside of Japan. Everybody is referring to their annual get-together for their martial arts group as a 'gasshuku'.
I did some quick searching and found that with a couple of exceptions, the term does not appear in most news stories or martial arts publications until around 1970, and only a few times. It really seems to have taken off in 2010 or so, and it is gaining popularity.
From what I can gather, a 'gasshuku' is a Japanese term that literally means "staying together" as a group to build relationships. It was primarily and historically used in Japan for school children, and was not specifically applied to martial artists.
Boot-camp bukatsu no place for the fainthearted | The Japan Times
"Even today when Japanese society and schools have become so much more jiyu (liberal) than 20 years ago, the bukatsu experience remains pretty much the same. The ichinensei (freshmen) are expected to fetch and carry, clean the bushitsu (club locker room) and, during gasshuku (concentrated camp training that’s done away from school in some rural area), wash the senpai’s uniforms, keep the mugicha (barley tea) cold, and many other chores that come on top of all the training and practicing."
http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts-files/jsc/jsc-history-booklet.pdf
This is the first example of the term I found in a Google News search:
Nationale Meisterschaften im Goju Ryu Karate - Sport - Allgemeine Zeitung
It is a reference (in German, I believe) to a gasshuku that a leader of a Namibian Goju Ryu group has been invited to attend.
Here is another reference from 2008:
FightingArts.com - Traditional winter training in Japan: The Kashima jodo gasshuku
"Traditional winter training in Japan: The Kashima jodo gasshuku
By Deborah Klens-Bigman, Ph.D."
By Deborah Klens-Bigman, Ph.D."
Searching old Black Belt Magazine articles online, I found a reference in 1984, again to a Goju Ryu group:
Black Belt
So this is all kind of new to me. A term I had not heard before, which seems to be a traditional Japanese term usually applied to school children, and now applied to annual martial arts training gatherings, often in combination with a 'shiai' or tournament.
Fascinating!